1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telephone subscriber terminals in general, and in particular to processor controlled interactive telephones. More particularly, it relates to personalized telephones configurable to operate as automatic attendants capable of responding to predicted varieties of incoming and outgoing call circumstances. Hardware simplicity is achieved by means of multi-layered microprocessor-based control of a full digital, solid-state, telephone terminal.
2. Background Art
U.S. Pat. No. 4,266,098 granted May 5, 1981 to Novak discloses a device which monitors information contained in incoming telephone calls, and which, when attached to or combined with the circuitry of a telephone receiver, will automatically hold and display the identity of the caller while allowing the telephone bell to be rung only at certain times and/or for certain callers. The caller's identity can be determined by the called party without personally answering the telephone and without revealing to the caller whether the called party is at home or not. It can be used to automatically screen incoming calls and prevent the reception of calls which are unwanted. Accordingly, it can be used to allow unwanted calls to ring the telephone's bell and thus, for example, awaken the user at night, while preventing all unwanted calls from disturbing the called party.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,985,913 granted Jan. 15, 1991 to Shalom et al. discloses a telephone answering machine which stores a plurality of messages and establishes a correspondence between those messages and a plurality of phone numbers. The phone number of a caller is identified and one of the plurality of messages is selected for playback based on the identified phone number and the established correspondence. In a preferred embodiment, the answering machine is microprocessor-based and the correspondence of telephone numbers to messages is stored in a memory table. Messages may be stored either on magnetic media or in semiconductor memory using a signal compression/decompression module where economy dictates in order to reduce the size of the semiconductor memory. Microprocessor control allows economical realization of a full-featured machine.